#oneaday Day 219: Getting it done

I finally managed to muster up the motivation to make some YouTube videos today. Three of them, in fact; they'll be up on the channel over the course of the next week or so.

To be clear, I wasn't putting off making these videos because I didn't want to make them; I was primarily putting them off because I had a cold in mid-December, and it's left me with a really annoying cough but no other symptoms. (I went to the doctor to see if it was an infection or anything, and it seems there's nothing to be concerned about; I just Have A Cough for a bit, frustratingly.)

I didn't want to start recording videos and collapse into a coughing fit partway through, so I'd been putting it off, particularly as a couple of weekends ago I started trying to record a The Dagger of Amon Ra playthrough and had to stop because my throat wasn't up to it.

My cough is still here — mostly in the evenings, and especially annoyingly when I lie down to go to sleep — but I managed to hold it at bay for the duration of three videos earlier, which is nice. Those three videos are kicking off something I want to be doing throughout this year: exploring a variety of home computer stuff, including Spectrum, Amiga and C64 stuff as well as the Atari 8-bit and ST stuff I've primarily built my channel on.

It felt good to finally get them done. While I have no real "obligations" towards my YouTube channel and could just… stop making videos at any point with no real consequence, it would feel like a great shame to do so. I have somehow made 1,303 videos so far since I created my channel in 2007 (but didn't start Being A Creator until to any vaguely serious degree until 2017) and my channel has shown very slow but steady growth, particularly over the course of the last five years or so. I don't have any grand designs on Being A YouTuber as a career, particularly since the sort of stuff I do isn't exactly algorithm-baiting, but it is nice to be able to sit down, play some games, talk about them to an empty room and feel like at least a few people will, eventually, listen.

In some respects, being able to do that with YouTube has almost been a substitute for being able to spend time with friends talking about this stuff. Pretty much all of my friends who used to be into gaming to any degree have drifted away for one reason or another, and it really sucks to be enthusiastic about things and have no-one to share that with. So by handling my YouTube videos the way I do — as if I'm sitting playing it with the viewer there as a friend beside me — it at least helps a bit with that side of things, if not all of the loneliness I feel at times.

Anyway, like I say, those videos will be coming out over the next week or so. There's one Spectrum one, one C64 one and one Atari 8-bit one; I'm not necessarily going to do all that every week (at least partly because I want to do some ST and Amiga stuff in there too) but it's a nice spread to start the year with. And it's onwards to a whole new year of exploring classic home computers and the myriad weird and wonderful games they played host to!

If you're not yet subscribed, stop by my channel, watch a few vids and hit the dang subscribe button already. Here's a link. Go on, click it.

Want to read my thoughts on various video games, visual novels and other popular culture things? Stop by MoeGamer.net, my site for all things fun where I am generally a lot more cheerful. And if you fancy watching some vids on classic games, drop by my YouTube channel.

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#oneaday Day 210: Making some video plans

I was hoping to make more videos over the course of December for "DOScember", but a nasty cold with a cough that's been lingering for a while (and still is a bit) put paid to those plans. I was really hoping to play through both The Dagger of Amon Ra and the spiritual successor to the Laura Bow series, The Crimson Diamond, but that hasn't happened. I did start trying to record a The Dagger of Amon Ra playthrough, but my throat gave out in less than ten minutes, so I abandoned that plan.

I mean, there's no reason they still can't happen, they just won't be "DOScember" features any more. And that's fine. So I think I may well still go ahead with those, 'cause doing adventure game playthroughs is always a lot of fun.

I've been pondering other things to do along the way, too. One thing I definitely want to do is spend some time exploring other microcomputer systems alongside the Atari stuff I've done a bunch of to date. There was some interesting discussion on Bluesky earlier today about how the overly "Americanised" canon of gaming history has a habit of erasing stuff like the European microcomputer scene, so I want to spend some time redressing the balance there a bit. I've obviously done a lot of Atari stuff already, and I intend to keep going that because it's a personal passion, but I also want to make some use of the C64 "Maxi", TheA500 Mini and The Spectrum that I have, because those are all thoroughly lovely machines.

As good a place as any to start with those would be to work through the built-in games on each, since that's actually not something I've done to date for anything other than The400 Mini. So a cautious plan I have is to spend a bit of time exploring each of those systems' built-in libraries, then onward into some other stuff on each of those platforms, just like I've done with the Atari 8-bit.

Assuming my voice holds out, then, I think that's what I'm going to try and make a start on this weekend, along with maybe a bit of The Dagger of Amon Ra.

I've also reached a conclusion I think I've known all along: I am absolutely not cut out for streaming. I just can't be arsed with it. It's a lot of setup and effort to get going, it's a pain to promote (particularly given my potential audience is all over the globe and thus there's no "good" timezone for it) and the number of viewers I get (both live and on the archived version on YouTube) is crap compared to my standard videos. I know that's something that improves with time, but this is supposed to be a hobby, not work, so I'm just going to stick with what I know and enjoy, and which works well — which is YouTube.

I'm not ruling out occasional "special" streams for events, charity drives and suchlike, or occasional chats with my buddy Chris in a quasi-podcast format. But I'm not going to make it a regular part of my routine. I know several people who want desperately to "make it" as a streamer, and they seem to spend a lot of their lives being miserable, and I have no desire to get into that situation. I do this for fun.

So, amid a bit of game room reorganisation that may be happening this weekend, I'm going to make a start on another year of retro computing fun. Broadening my remit will be an interesting journey for me to take, and it may well bring some new people to the channel, too. I know from previous times I've done this that there are a couple of people who get a bit sniffy when I cover non-Atari stuff, but y'know what? My channel, my rules. I am interested in gaming and microcomputer history, and while Atari stuff will always carry significant personal meaning for me, I want to know more about the other parts of this side of things, too.

So that means C64, Spectrum and Amiga stuff! There's a huge library of things for me to explore on all of those platforms, and still plenty of Atari material I haven't covered, either. So I certainly don't think I'm going to be short of things to play and talk about this year. Now I just need to make the dang videos!

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#oneaday Day 175: I picked what to play for #DOScember

As you will know if you've been reading for the past few days, I've been mulling over what to do for "DOScember" this year on my YouTube channel. I was fairly firmly set on doing another full adventure game playthrough, but hadn't quite settled on what.

Well, after being recommended the excellent looking The Crimson Diamond, I'm… not going to play that right away. Instead, I'm going to play at least one of the games it cribs extensively from, and a series of adventure games I've always wanted to check out but never got around to: the Laura Bow mysteries from Sierra.

I've spent a little time familiarising myself with the first game The Colonel's Bequest this evening, and I think I've got a feel for what to expect now. This was a highly experimental game for creator Roberta Williams, and modern commentators tend to agree that it doesn't quite succeed at what it's trying to do, but it's a thoroughly interesting game nonetheless. That sounds like ideal fodder to play, talk about and discuss. Plus, like I say, I've wanted to play both Laura Bow games for ages and never made the time to do so.

For the unfamiliar, The Colonel's Bequest is a mystery-themed adventure game in which you play the 1920s journalism student Laura Bow, who has come along to provide moral support for her friend Lillian while she attends a family reunion of sorts. Said reunion is taking place on the plantation of Colonel Henri Dijon, a former war hero, and is, for maximum creepiness, in the very depths of a bayou in the southern United States.

Upon arriving at the mansion, Laura notes that despite the Colonel announcing that he has left an equal share of his fortune to everyone present (except Laura, obviously), all the family members immediately start being absolute dickheads to one another, and it's clear that mischief is about to be afoot. What then follows is a curious twist on the usual adventure game formula, where you, as Laura, must wander through the mansion and its grounds, attempting to gather pieces of evidence and knowledge that will allow you to leave the situation 1) alive and 2) with a full understanding of what happened.

The Colonel's Bequest mostly lacks conventional puzzles, aside from a couple of instances. Instead, the game is mostly about being in the right place at the right time to witness or discover things; the game is split into hour-long Acts, which in turn are split into 15-minute time blocks, and discovering something significant causes time to advance. It's possible to advance time before gathering important items or speaking with certain characters; indeed, it's possible to "finish" the game with almost complete obliviousness to what happened around Laura, and you are not penalised for doing so, other than receiving a low "Sleuth" rating in the finale.

What this effectively means is that The Colonel's Bequest is a game in which taking notes of what happens when, where, how and why is quite important, particularly if you plan to replay the whole thing. Having pieces of evidence or knowledge to ask or tell people about can lead to learning more about what's going on, and you'll need to follow all these threads to their various conclusions as much as possible to get the best rating.

I stopped playing for this evening because I don't want to spoil too much for myself. I suspect my playthrough won't conclude with me getting the elusive "Super Sleuth" rating at the conclusion of the playthrough, but I'm looking forward to giving it a go anyway. In typical Sierra style, there are some delightful characters involved, along with some fun narration, and this is what I'm really looking forward to: having an excuse to do some silly voices.

Anyway, yeah. So that's the plan. The Colonel's Bequest, at the very least. And if I get through that fairly quickly, on to The Dagger of Amon Ra. And if I beat that before December is through, then I'll look at The Crimson Diamond. After all, I felt like I should probably familiarise myself with the "source material" before jumping into something that is a direct and unashamed homage to it, right?

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#oneaday Day 173: Staring down the barrel of #DOScember

#DOScember is the annual celebration of DOS gaming and computing on YouTube and surrounding environments (not to be confused with #DOSember, which is a Twitch thing) and, even though many of the original participants and organisers have become somewhat disillusioned with the whole thing for various reasons, it's still a fun excuse to bust out some classic MS-DOS games and remind yourself of how good early '90s PC gaming was.

I did a few videos last #DOScember that I not only enjoyed making, they also performed rather well on my channel. So I'm likely going to spend this December doing primarily DOS gaming stuff on my YouTube channel.

I'm thinking a few things at this point. Firstly, I'm quite keen to do another full adventure game playthrough similar to my The Lost Files of Sherlock Holmes: The Case of the Serrated Scalpel runthrough from last year. (This wasn't a #DOScember thing, it was just something I felt like doing at the time.) I haven't yet decided what I should do as yet; on the one hand, playing something I'm already familiar with should mean that I can get through it without getting stuck, but on the other, this might be a prime opportunity to explore a game I've never tried for the first time.

The temptation when thinking "I want to play an adventure game" is to jump straight to Sierra and LucasArts, and for sure, they are all solid choices. But there were other folks making adventures at the time, too, and I think the stuff from them is worth celebrating, too. At present, I'm leaning towards something from Access Software, as these are games I've never tried, and I know at least some of them (the Tex Murphy games and Countdown spring immediately to mind) are fondly regarded.

When considering that I probably want to play these games as a Let's Play, I'd also prefer a game that isn't "talkie", so I can narrate and do the voices myself. It's a silly little thing, but I do very much enjoy doing this, so it's something I'm particularly looking for.

The other thing that I'll probably do is at least a few "pre-scripted" videos like I did last year. Last time around, I looked at early first-person shooters, games I'd always wanted to try but never had the chance to, and interesting discoveries I'd stumbled across by chance. Those are solid formats, and all of those videos performed well; I'm thinking I might do something other than first-person shooters for the first bit though. Perhaps space sims or flight sims? Those are ripe for exploration, and they're both genres I used to absolutely love.

Anyway, that's the plan for #DOScember on the YouTube channel. If you have any good DOS adventure game suggestions (preferably of the point-and-click variety, and preferably not "talkie", as outlined above) then I'd love to hear 'em. Otherwise, I'll see you on the channel!

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#oneaday Day 157: A happy ending (not in a sex way)

I'm pleased to report that all of us kicking up a stink over RoseTintedSpectrum's YouTube channel being wrongfully terminated yesterday has proven successful: our lad managed to finally get through to a human being at YouTube, and his channel has been reinstated, with just an obviously insincere, automated "apology" of sorts from YouTube attached.

This is obviously a good resolution to what was a stressful and upsetting situation for Rosie, and it should bring a few things into sharp focus for everyone. Corporations are not your friends. Corporations can and will take things that you have created away from you at a moment's notice. Corporations do not care, particularly when they rely on automation and "AI" to do their work for them.

Human beings are your friends. Individuals that you make a personal connection with are how you get by in this increasingly horrible world that we live in. Friendship groups and communities can get things done — the last 24 hours has clearly proven that, with Rosie's story not only spreading across Twitter and temporarily drowning out at least some of the white supremacy thanks to the few creators with a decent following who are still there, but also making some noise on BlueSky and even getting a writeup on the retro gaming website from the NintendoLife folks, Time Extension.

I find it kind of hilarious, tragic and frustrating that there are some folks who took glee in this whole situation. People such as the odious George "FunkySpectrum" Cropper, who has made his entire online life about spreading hatred of people he doesn't like. And people like one anonymous stroppy twat who goes by "GlamorousAlpaca" in Time Extension's comments, who just made shit up about Rosie for no apparent reason. But as frustrating as the sad, pathetic existence of these people is, they will never know the joy that Rosie is undoubtedly feeling right now: the understanding that there are people out there who like him, care about him and will fight for him when he has been wronged.

I'm glad that all this has been successfully resolved, but I'm concerned that this sort of thing seems to be happening a lot more of late. The cynic in me blames the rise in the use of "AI" in big corporations like Google; despite these systems being demonstrably fallible and prone to hallucinations, it seems big business is willing to trust its judgement, even going so far as to give it the power to completely remove someone's hard work from the Internet for a perceived (and, I reiterate, non-existent) infraction. It happened to me with WordPress.com, it happened to Rosie on YouTube and I'm sure we'll hear about it happening to other people, too.

The Internet continues to enshittify itself, but we can still find havens of sanity amid groups of like-minded, sensible, supportive and caring people. If you have been fortunate enough to find a group like that online, be sure to hold on to them with everything you have. I feel like they will only become more valuable to you as time goes on.

Oh, while you're here, go pop RoseTintedSpectrum a subscribe if you haven't already. Watch a few vids and leave a couple of nice comments, too. The lad could do with a smile after the last 24 hours.

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#oneaday Day 156: A reminder that automated moderation solutions suck

Hello. Bit of a serious one today. Many of you reading this will likely be familiar with the YouTube channel RoseTintedSpectrum. He has suffered an extremely unfortunate happening today in that YouTube has seen fit to completely obliterate his entire channel. Their reasoning? He supposedly violated their policies about "spam, scams and deceptive practices". Needless to say, he did not.

For the unfamiliar, RoseTintedSpectrum is someone who's been doing YouTube for a few years now. As the name of his channel suggests, he started out doing videos about old Spectrum games, and his dry humour and cynical wit won him a small but dedicated following of folks who enjoyed what he put out. Over time, he branched out into a niche that is somewhat underserved: providing commentary on "classic" TV shows, beginning with ITV's show about video games and computer culture, Bad Influence. Most recently, he has been doing huge retrospectives on the legendary GamesMaster, and these videos caused his channel to have a huge and well-deserved surge in popularity.

Well, they did, anyway. For reasons known only to YouTube's automated moderation algorithm, his channel has now been banished to the shadow realm, and he is unable to get a human response out of anyone. He attempted to appeal the "decision" and got a negative response back within 5 minutes, suggesting that no human being has been involved at any step in this process. And they have the gall to say on Twitter that "these decisions are made very carefully" and "thoughtfully". Are they fuck.

If all this sounds a little familiar, it's very similar to what happened with me and WordPress.com a while back — the reason this blog is now self-hosted rather than hosted with WordPress.com. That was almost the exact same situation: my hard work of many years (nearly 20 in my case!) was accidentally and incorrectly branded as "spam", and immediately removed from circulation without warning or any attempt to contact me. Thankfully, my repeated badgering and yelling at WordPress.com meant that it was back up and running again the next day, but the whole situation spurred me on to move my blog off-site.

There's a key difference there, though; while I could do that with my blog, YouTubers do not have that luxury. People who make videos are pretty much locked in to YouTube for life, because self-hosting videos is completely unworkable from both a storage space and bandwidth perspective. There are other video-hosting solutions out there, but they all have issues — no-one gives a shit about Vimeo (particularly now it's branded itself as "AI-powered") and Rumble is full of the absolute worst shitheads on the planet. So for most folks, it's YouTube or nothing.

I want to emphasise this key point: it is completely unacceptable for automated moderation tools to have the power to take a creator's hard work offline without even attempting to contact them. It is completely unacceptable that this occurs without any human input whatsoever. And it is completely unacceptable for YouTube's support team, when contacted about this issue, to say there is "nothing more they can do" because the automated appeal response to the automated channel deletion decided within less than five minutes that no mistakes had been made at any point in the automation process.

If a channel is flagged as being in violation of some sort of policy, that should be an immediate signal for an actual human to look at it. It should have taken anyone human less than five minutes to determine that there was nothing on RoseTintedSpectrum's channel even remotely related to "spam, scams or deceptive practices", and this whole situation should have never happened in the first place.

But no. Because big corpos like Google are all-in on AI and automation, they trust the clearly and demonstrably fallible machines to handle it all themselves — including any attempts to appeal the decisions. And the result is situations like we have now, where a dedicated and hard-working creative type is left with absolutely nothing to show for years of hard graft.

RoseTintedSpectrum puts an unbelievable amount of effort into each and every video he has ever made, and that should be abundantly clear to any human being looking at his channel.

But sadly, because no human being at YouTube has looked at his channel, we're left with the situation we're in now. Which is completely unacceptable.

If you're still clinging on to your Twitter account in the vain hope that the last week or so has all been a bad dream, I urge you to contact @TeamYouTube and @YouTubeLiaison over there to let them know they have made a huge mistake — RoseTintedSpectrum's YouTube account, if you want to copy that in, also, is @SpectrumTinted. With any luck, this will all be resolved sooner rather than later.

And if you're reading this and happen to be in any sort of position to make big decisions at your place of work: automated moderation solutions are fucking bad and should always have human oversight. So don't fucking delete people's hard work before you even attempt to contact them.

Sort it out, YouTube.

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#oneaday Day 153: Sharing stuff

Hello. If you follow me here, it's relatively likely that you follow me in other places, too. But I realise that there is the possibility you don't. As such, I would like to devote today's post to sharing a few things I've done over on YouTube. If you would like to follow my YouTube channel, here's the link. Over there, I make videos on video games, primarily retro stuff but with occasional dalliances into more recent stuff I feel like talking about. And also related topics, which brings me to the first video I would like to share.

Exactly what does Yars' Revenge taste like? I decided to find out. Yes, I am someone who is foolish enough to see a range of 10 sauces with "Atari" written on them, and then to spend £70 on purchasing all of them. I partly did this because I like Atari, partly because I like a good sauce, and partly because I thought it might make a fun video. I am pleased to report that these ten sauces have fulfilled all of their obligations, and you can see my first reactions to them in the video above.

You probably know this, but for my day job I work for Blaze Entertainment, makers of the Evercade range of consoles and the HyperMegaTech! Super Pocket devices, which are also Evercade compatible. When I learned we would be doing an Atari handheld, I was, of course, delighted — even more so when I learned we would be doing a special edition woodgrain model. In this video, I give a quick overview of all 50 games on the system. I was not paid to do this by either my employer or Atari — I just wanted to, because there's some cool stuff on there, and I'm an Atari nerd.

Atari attracted some raised eyebrows when they announced Yars Rising, a follow-up to the famous 1982 Atari 2600 title. I played the demo one Steam Next Fest and was very taken with it — helped enormously by the fact I'm very fond of the other games developer WayForward have previously worked on. I bought the full game and really enjoyed it, so I made a video about it, based on my write-up over on MoeGamer. It did quite well by the standards of my channel, too, which was nice.

This video didn't do very well, at least initially, and it's still sitting on the low side of the view count compared to some of my other stuff. But I wanted to share it because it's about a thoroughly interesting game: The Missing by SWERY65. This is a platformer in which you play a woman who can't die; she can survive being decapitated and dismembered and, indeed, it's necessary to endure both of those things in order to solve the game's various puzzles.

Far from being a weirdly violent horror game, though, The Missing is actually a thoroughly fascinating, deeply personal story about gender identity and finding acceptance — both in yourself, and from those around you. The game was so striking to me I really wanted to talk about it, so I'm glad I made this video, even if not that many people watched it.

Let's close with this one. I went into this thinking that doing a video on a text adventure would be a silly idea, but ended up really enjoying the whole thing. Narrating the whole thing makes for (in my humble opinion, anyway) a relaxing, pleasant video, and I don't mind admitting that I've fallen asleep to the sound of my own voice in this video on multiple occasions. Plus I think Moonmist is a thoroughly interesting game from Infocom that rarely gets talked about.

Anyway, I hope you enjoy those. Please do feel free to subscribe over on YouTube if you want to see more. My wife Andie is away for a couple of days from tomorrow lunchtime, so I'm going to use the time to record a bunch of stuff, I think, and probably do some streaming, too. Join me!

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#oneaday Day 135: Just one is fine

As I type this, I can overhear my wife listening to some YouTuber I hate the sound of promising to "review every celebrity brand make-up". And this reminded me of a weird trend that is specifically a YouTube thing, whereby it seems like looking at just one thing is never enough, you've always got to do every instance of a thing.

I Ate At Every Margaritaville In the Country. I Watched Every Barbie Movie. I Played Every Poorly Reviewed Soulslike Game on Steam. This particular "style" of video always seems to be combined with some sort of deliberate suffering — both for the presenter and the viewer, I'd wager — and honestly, it just doesn't appeal to me at all. I'm the sort of person who would much rather take their time over exploring something sprawling in depth and detail than attempting to cram it all into one video — because I can't help but feel if you're cramming a massive amount of things into one video, each individual thing isn't going to get much of a look-in, is it?

I realise this is the point of some of these videos, either to highlight the fact that the many instances of Thing are almost identical to one another and thus can't really be distinguished, but it still irks me somewhat — especially when it comes to a lineup of things that is quite varied such as, say, the output of a particular software company. A video along the lines of "I Played Every Blizzard Game" feels like it would do none of the games any real justice, because each one is very different from the last and deserves its time to shine. Hell, even "I Watched Every Barbie Movie" is probably doing at least some of the Barbie movies a disservice.

My thinking along these lines is why I handled the "Atari A to Z Flashback" series on my YouTube channel as I did. Atari Flashback Classics for Nintendo Switch had 150 games, so I made 150 videos. It took a long time, but I came out of it feeling like I'd completed a worthwhile project — and I absolutely gained some new appreciation for a bunch of games from among that 150 that I otherwise wouldn't have if I'd just given them all a cursory glance and been done within 20 minutes.

Now I'm not saying that everything has to be an epic, long series or anything, and I suspect what I'm describing is more of a "me problem" than anything else. But I know that I, personally, would much rather take my time going through something with a lot of component parts, giving each piece time to digest and myself the opportunity to come to some conclusions that I might not otherwise have been able to if I was racing through to meet my "content deadline".

I guess that isn't what people want these days, though. They want short, quick-fire, snappy — because the modern Web has been set up to pander primarily to those with no attention span. But, as I've argued on several previous occasions, I fear that this just creates a vicious cycle, whereby people's attention spans get shorter and shorter, and the quality and depth people go into when writing or producing videos suffers as a result.

If someone doesn't have the attention span to stick around for more than 3 seconds, that's not my problem; that is very much their problem. I am gratified to see the recent growth in "newsletters" (or blogs, as we used to call them) that present long-form articles intended to be sat down with and savoured; they're not for everyone, sure, but it does please me to know that there are other people out there who enjoy life on the verbose side of things, and they don't care if they "lose" some people due to the sheer length of what they post. As I say, that's a reader problem, not a writer problem. No-one told Charles Dickens not to spend so many fucking pages describing fog — instead, he just gave anyone who couldn't handle it the finger, and his work continues to be regarded as a classic regardless. No-one's going to remember the names of any YouTube Shorts or TikTok creators in 50 years.

I think I got off the point somewhere. But yeah. Review one thing at a time, please. Then I might take your opinions seriously.

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#oneaday Day 102: Pondering YouTube... again

Having one of those days where I'm pondering my approach to YouTube. Y'see, my latest video, which covers Atari's Yars Rising and is essentially just a video version of this article, has gone and done very well. Relatively speaking, I mean, and by that I mean it's broken a thousand views.

For a small-scale sub-5,000 subscriber YouTuber like me, getting anything to break 1,000 views is significant. I've had a few successes over the last couple of years, and most of them have had something in common: they've been pre-scripted videos, as opposed to the "Let's Play" style I built my channel on, and which I think I probably enjoy doing the most.

Probably my most significant success to date is the above video, which covers the excellent modern isometric racer Super Woden GP. This video has, to date, managed 87,000 views and is still trickling along. This was absolutely overwhelming to watch happen, to such a degree that I ended up having to "pause" the comments section because I was getting so many people commenting.

My second best is the above, which covers Moonring, an excellent modern take on the classic Ultima RPG formula, developed by one of the folks who worked on the original Fable. Plus it's free. This one has been a slow burn; to date it's done over 29,000 views, but it got off to quite a slow start. Compare the graphs for these two videos.

Here's Super Woden GP 2:

And here's Moonring:

Notice that the latter one spiked for some inexplicable reason about 250 days after I posted it. I don't really know what happened here; I can only assume that it got shared somewhere and a lot of people showed up. But the analytics seem to suggest that YouTube just decided to suddenly start pushing it one day, so it started appearing when people were just browsing around the site:

The Yars Rising video hasn't done anything like the numbers of these two, but it's also still early days for it — at the time of writing, it's just two days old. But it's had a strong early push:

The one thing that the Yars Rising video has in common with the Super Woden GP 2 one in particular is that it was something timely. I made the video shortly after Yars Rising came out, when there was still some discussion going on about it. That, presumably, helps. But it doesn't account for what happened with the Moonring video.

Anyway, the point is, any time something like this happens, I end up wondering if I should change tack a bit with YouTube. The approach I've taken for the vast majority of my videos is one where I introduce a game with a bit to camera at the start, then do a "Let's Play", where I explain the game as if I'm sitting down to play it with the viewer.

Some of these videos have done quite nicely. This one, on Seven Cities of Gold for Atari 8-bit, broke a thousand views:

As did this one on Beamrider for Atari 2600, though that's over the very long term:

I like making those videos. I think they're a good way of helping people to understand how to play and figure out the appeal of retro games. And yet the numbers don't lie: what gets people watching is pre-scripted, more "review-style" videos.

Don't get me wrong, those are fun to write and to make, also — plus I can generally cross-post them between YouTube and MoeGamer for two completely different audiences to see them — but any time I ponder maybe switching to doing that kind of video all the time, I think of the people who have very kindly stuck with me since the earliest days of me fumbling around with the platform, figuring out what the hell I actually wanted to do with my YouTube channel.

I suspect it's not an "all or nothing" question. I suspect the answer is something I know already: that the optimal approach would be to do a bit of both. Perhaps "Let's Play" style videos on simpler, earlier games, and more elaborate scripted affairs for more complex, longer games.

I don't know. I'm just thinking out loud here. If I was a bigger channel I'd just say "fuck it" and start a second channel then split the two types of video between the two channels, but it seems foolish to do that as a small creator.

But anyway. I'm glad the Yars Rising video is doing reasonable numbers, at least. It's a cool game and I'm glad people want to know more about it. So if nothing else, I can be glad about that!

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#oneaday Day 98: Feature Creep

One of the things that really annoys me about modern websites is the obsession with feature creep, and nowhere is that more apparent than on social media and adjacent sites, with YouTube being a particularly prime example.

As if the scourge that is YouTube Shorts wasn't enough, the latest feature that it's impossible to dismiss permanently — telling it to go away only makes it disappear for a month at most — is "YouTube Playables", a range of bottom-of-the barrel mobile game crap designed to placate the ever more attention-deficit body of users who can't possibly just do one thing at a time.

I honestly don't get it. Who looked at YouTube and went "you know what this needs? Shitty mobile games!" Who looked at Netflix and decided that needed to be a gaming platform? For that matter, who looked at fricking Facebook and thought games on there would be a good idea?

The argument that usually gets trotted out with this sort of thing is that it "gets more people into gaming". Frankly, I've always thought this to be bollocks. Gaming has never been more accessible and affordable on platforms that are specifically built for it, and there is only one possible reason it is being shoehorned in everywhere that it doesn't belong: to monetise the crap out of it, be it through ads, in-app purchases or subscription price hikes.

At this point I'd almost pay YouTube a fee to not have to see garbage like Shorts and Playables ever again. There are fundamental features of their platform that still don't work properly and they waste time with this shit? Someone wants firing.

But I guess someone, somewhere has decided this junk "adds value", so here we are, stuck with it, in yet another example of the Web being enshittified. At least there's no "AI" features in YouTube… yet. Don't you love our cyberpunk dystopian future?

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